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Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: MD5 in LISP and abstraction inversions
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From: Erik Naggum
Message-ID: <3214331000184216@naggum.net>
Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway
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Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2001 21:43:22 GMT
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* Kent M Pitman
| We made CL in the believe that being standard was more powerful than
| being uniquely right.
I believe the best notion of what is right will emerge by itself if you
keep the definitely wrong away. Evolution works this way: Contrary to
popular belief and the statement "survival of the fittest", a much more
accurate description is "early death of the unfit". Among all the weird
ideas people get, weed out the bad ones early, and whatever is not bad
enough to stand out as monumentally stupid at the time may have enough
merit to make a difference somewhere down the line. Believing in the
survival of "right" leads to _really_ bad social experiments.
| So we nailed it down. We're supposed to have moved beyond those things
| to new areas to bicker about.
But this requires people who are cognizant of the necessarily political
nature of _every_ community consensus-forming process and who are not
irrationally allergic to forming networks of agreement with other people
despite the lack of a "uniquely right" way. People _cannot_ agree on
what is right -- that would starve a community of every opportunity to
evolve. They _can_, however, agree on what is _wrong_, and if they can
limit that to that which is _definitely_ wrong, the more room there is
for things right. However, it does require that people in the community
are able to listen when their suggestions fall in the "definitely wrong"
category. So far, nothing suggests that the if* stunt, _including_ its
abject rejection and attempt at full replacement of _all_ the standard
conditionals in the language, if, when, unless, case, typecase, etc, is
going to avoid falling in the "definitely wrong" category, mostly because
it does nothing but add some redundant noise to cond and is no _actual_
replacement for or _definite_ improvement over anything. It is simply an
irrational stylistic issue (the part about rejecting everything else),
and a historical accident perpetuated for irrational reasons. "Move on"
is precisely what we should do, but, unfortunatley, it require that the
perpetrator of this silliness respects when the community rejects him.
So far, that that is _not_ going to happen is the only thing we know
about the current situation.
///
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